Die Upon a Kiss

by Barbara Hambly

  As he eased Belaggio out of his coat and waistcoats— the impresario affected the dandyish habit of wearing two—and made another futile search for anything else resembling a wound, January wondered what any of these people, let alone all of them, were doing in and around the American Theater at twenty minutes after three in the morning.

  Himself, and Marguerite Scie, he understood. While a twenty-four-year-old student of surgery in Paris, he had made ends meet by playing piano for the ballet school at the Théâtre de l’Odéon. Though close to forty then, Madame had still been dancing, precise and perfect as Damascus steel. They had been lovers, the first white woman he had had. When, much later, he had met and sought to marry the woman he loved, it was Madame who had gotten him a job playing harpsicord for the Comédie Française—the job that had let him and Ayasha wed. Madame had, over the next few years, sent piano pupils his way, and had recommended Ayasha’s skills as a dressmaker to both the Comédie’s costume shop and to the actresses of the company: even in the heartland of Liberté, Egalité, and Fraternité, there were few who would choose a surgeon of nearly-pure African descent over white Frenchmen.

  When January had entered the American Theater yesterday to meet the opera company Mr. Caldwell had brought to New Orleans from Havana, Marguerite Scie’s first words to him had been I grieved to hear of your wife’s death.

  They had had much to talk about.

  The others . . .

  January wrapped Belaggio’s shuddering bulk in a kingly cloak of beggar’s velvet and dyed rabbit-fur someone handed him, and tallied the faces in the candle-light.

  Hannibal Sefton’s presence, if unexplained, at least wasn’t sinister. January had known the fiddler for two and a half years now and knew the man didn’t have a violent bone in his opium-laced body. Through the evening’s rehearsal, as he’d sat at the piano, January had heard Hannibal’s stifled coughing behind him, and whenever he turned, it had been to see his friend’s thin face white and set with pain. As usual when his consumption bore hard on him, Hannibal had taken refuge in laudanum to get him through rehearsal, and January guessed, by the creases in his rusty black coat and the way his graying hair straggled loose over his back from its old-fashioned queue, that he’d simply fallen asleep afterward in a corner of the green room. How he managed to play as beautifully as he did under the circumstances was something January had yet to figure out, but that was the only mystery about Hannibal.

  The presence of the others was less easily accounted for.

  Drusilla d’Isola, girlishly slim and frail-looking, he knew to be Belaggio’s mistress, and it didn’t take much guessing to place her there. Her dressing-room was on the second floor above the rehearsal-room and offices. According to company gossip, it included a daybed among its lavish amenities, as well as gas lighting—the only dressing-room so supplied—a gilt-footed bath-tub, a coffee-urn, a French armoire painted with cupids, and even a small dining table. Her hair, the color of refined molasses, was no longer in the elaborately upswept Psyche knot in which it had been dressed at rehearsal, and January could tell by the fit of her plum-colored moiré dress that it had been laced hastily—probably by herself—and that she wore neither corset nor petticoats beneath.

  Consuela Montero’s raven hair was dressed, shining with an unbroken pomaded luster in its fantasia of loops, tulle bows, and blood-red ostrich-tips, and the crimson gown that made her creamy skin glow almost golden was laced and trussed as only a maidservant’s attentions could make it. The soprano had protuberant brown eyes that reminded January of a wild horse ready to kick or bite or bolt. At the moment she was regarding La d’Isola with undisguised contempt as the prima donna emerged with fluttering eyelids from her swoon.

  “Are you all right?” Monsieur Marsan tenderly stroked d’Isola’s wrists. Even his stickpin matched, an amethyst like a pale iris’s heart set in a twilight-hued cravat. “M’sieu, the brandy, if you would . . .”

  January passed the brandy back to Hannibal, who took another gulp before returning it to Marsan. “It is not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door,” observed the fiddler, leaning over January’s shoulder as January checked Belaggio’s hammering pulse. Fortunately he spoke English, since the wound so described in Romeo and Juliet had proved fatal and Belaggio was making a sufficiently Senecan tragedy of his injury as it was. “Shall I get more blankets, or shall we move him—them”—he glanced back at La d’Isola, whom Monsieur Marsan had wrapped in his coat—“upstairs, where it’s warmer?”

  “By all means.” Marsan lifted the prima soprano as if she were a doll; La d’Isola sagged gracefully back so that her head hung over his elbow, her hair a rippling curtain halfway to the floor. January had seen her take the identical pose earlier that evening in the first rehearsal of Othello, when Staranzano the baritone bore her to the bed.

  Marsan’s dandyish ensemble had caught January’s eye at rehearsal, added to the fact that he’d sat apart from the other members of the newly-founded St. Mary Opera Society. That separation, at least, was now made clear— January wondered how it came about that a Creole Frenchman was a member of the Society at all. As a rule, the French Creoles who owned most of the plantations and who still controlled the money and power in the city avoided the newly-come, newly-wealthy Americans, treating even the representatives of the best families of New York, Virginia, Philadelphia, and Boston as if they were tobacco-spitting filibusters straight off the keelboats.

  This antipathy was in fact the genesis of the St. Mary Opera Society. The money contributed by the wealthy inhabitants of that new upriver American suburb was what enabled James Caldwell to go to Havana and enlist Belaggio, to bring to New Orleans a company which sang in the sweetly musical Italian style—pointedly different, Caldwell and Belaggio both assured their patrons, from the more lavish, but more harshly sung, French-style opera presented by the French Creole John Davis at his theater on the Rue d’Orleans.

  Curious, thought January, that a Creole like Marsan would be part of the St. Mary Society. . . .

  “Is Mademoiselle better?” Marsan’s boyishly handsome face creased with concern as he touched La d’Isola’s hair in the candlelight. “Come, we will take you somewhere warm and comfortable. . . .”

  Well, perhaps not so curious at that.

  “I faint!” croaked Signor Belaggio when January tried to get him to his feet. “I die!”

  January had the distinct impression that the impresario was angling to be borne upstairs like a slaughtered hero. January could have done it—he’d lugged and manhandled bigger men in his years as a surgeon—but his slashed arm smarted and he was beginning to feel light-headed himself. “Signor Ponte,” he called out as the chorus-boy darted down the stairs with voluble excuses about not having been able to find bandages or brandy or anything else where they should have been. “Help me, if you would be so kind.”

  “Keep him from me!” Belaggio directed a withering glare at Bruno Ponte. “It was he, he and his keeper, who attempted to assassinate me! You think he would not take the moment of holding me up to slip a little dagger between my ribs?”

  Ponte’s cupid-bow lips pulled back in rage. “Pisciasotto!”

  “Recchione!”

  “Fregatura!”

  “Gentlemen!” Hannibal shoved two candles into Ponte’s hands and went to help January himself. “There are ladies present.” And it was a good bet, thought January, that though La d’Isola was unconscious, both Madame Scie and Madame Montero knew enough Italian—even the highly dialectical Sicilian and Milanese— to understand what was being said.

  Between them they got Belaggio up the wide stairs that ascended from the brick-pillared gloom of the prop-vault to the backstage. This cavernous space was already a jumble of wings and flats, cupid-bedecked gilt furniture from next Tuesday’s presentation of Le Nozze di Figaro mixed with blue and green glass lamp filters and a nearly full-sized gondola from the melodrama The Venetian’s Revenge, which had been staged that evening for an audience that consi
sted largely of Kentucky backwoodsmen, filibusters, gun-runners, and riverfront rowdies. In the background loomed the half-finished plaster sections of what would hopefully become Mount Vesuvius in time for next Friday’s performance of La Muette de Portici, though at the moment the ramshackle collection of lathe, canvas, and sheets of red and orange silk bore little resemblance to the fire-spewing colossus that dominated the posters pasted to every wall in town.

  “Would someone stir up the fire in Signor Belaggio’s office? Madame . . .” Hannibal suggested as Belaggio jerked the key back from Ponte’s extended hand.

  With a sigh, Madame Montero took the key and went to open the office, the ballet mistress following with still more candles. Since these were tallow work-candles from the chorus-men’s dressing-room, the office quickly filled with their faint, sheep-like odor. January and Hannibal deposited Belaggio in the massive armchair beside the desk, then withdrew to the backstage again.

  “I’ve taken the liberty of carrying Mademoiselle d’Isola to her dressing-room.” The planter Marsan descended the stairs from the gallery off which the principals had their dressing-rooms, resplendent in waistcoat, shirtsleeves, and a pale-purple glitter of amethyst and silk. “Perhaps if you would be so good as to see to her, Madame . . .” Marsan divided his glance equally between Mesdames Scie and Montero; Hannibal bowed tactfully to Marguerite and said, “Might I escort you up, Madame? The stairs are very dark.” He took a candle and guided her out; the Mexican soprano’s scarlet-painted lips twisted with scorn and January reflected that it was just as well Montero wasn’t going to be left alone in a room with the unconscious prima donna—not that he supposed for a moment Drusilla d’Isola’s swoon to be real.

  “Five cents says La d’Isola’s back inside ten minutes.” Hannibal clattered down the steps again and led January to the carved and gilded throne of the Doge of Venice. “Seven, that she faints again the minute she’s got an audience. I nicked Belaggio’s brandy from his desk.” By the light of his single taper he eased January out of the rough jacket he’d put on for the walk home, and picked the slashed and sodden shirtsleeve away from the cut. “What bloody man is this?” he added, dropping from French to Shakespearean English, something Hannibal did with even greater facility than January, who was himself long used to switching from French to Spanish to English and back.

  “It looks worse than it is.”

  “It better, or we’ll be calling in the undertakers.” He doused January’s handkerchief in the brandy, took a gulp from the bottle, and daubed the wound. January flinched at the sting of it. Behind them in the office, Belaggio’s groans, gasps, and accusations continued for the benefit of Madame Montero and M’sieu Marsan. “Did you notice young Ponte changed his coat?”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Fairly.” Hannibal tried to open the folding pen-knife he’d taken from his pocket, but his skeletal fingers were unsteady; January took the knife from him, opened it, and handed it back to cut away the sleeve of his shirt. “He and Cavallo both were wearing long-tailed coats at rehearsal, and I think they were in the same outfits when I first saw them in the alley. Cavallo was, I know—a blue cutaway with a velvet collar.” He nodded toward Ponte, emerging from the office to hurry up the stairs. The chorus-boy’s boots were mud-splashed, January noticed, but the dove-colored trousers above them spotlessly clean. Even Hannibal, who’d come out of the theater only in the battle’s aftermath, had fresh spatters of mud on his calves.

  Working carefully, and turning aside now and then to cough, the fiddler sliced the clean lower portion of the linen sleeve from the bloodied, and used it to form a bandage. His breath labored in the silence, but he seemed better than he had earlier in the evening.

  “You, boy.” Marsan’s tall form blotted out the light of the office doorway. “We need water in here to make coffee.”

  Sixteen years ago, before he’d gone to Paris, it hadn’t bothered January to be addressed by strangers by the informal tu. That was just something that white men did when addressing slaves—though sixteen years ago most French Creoles were fairly careful to use the polite vous in speaking to men they knew were free colored, albeit they occasionally forgot and called black freedmen tu, as they would slaves, horses, children, or dogs. In Paris, everyone had spoken to him in the polite form—vous. He’d felt a kind of elation in it, as if it were a mark of an adulthood impossible in New Orleans. It surprised him sometimes, after two and a half years, how much he still minded.

  Sometimes it surprised and shamed him that he didn’t mind more.

  “M’sieu Janvier was hurt saving Signor Belaggio’s life,” said Hannibal, and he stood up, his hand unobtrusively on the back of the throne for support. “I’ll get the water.” He picked up the single candle and turned away toward the stairway down to the vault, where the big clay jars of drinking water stood. He hadn’t reached the stair, however, when the outer doors banged below, and lantern-light jostled over the brick of the walls.

  “. . . borne them upstairs,” Cavallo’s voice said in his lilting English, and boots clattered, first on the soft brick, then hollow on the wooden steps.

  “Them?” The light, scratchy tone of Abishag Shaw, Lieutenant of the New Orleans City Guards, veered skittishly between the Milanese’s faulty pronunciation of a French plural subjunctive and his own idiosyncratic comprehension of the language.

  As two blue-uniformed Guards, Shaw in his stained and sorry green coat, and Cavallo came into view, Hannibal explained. “Signorina d’Isola was overcome by the sight of the blood—” He switched from French to the Spanish that he was fairly certain only January would understand, and added, “—and I daresay by the spectacle of someone other than herself holding center stage.” He dropped back into French again to include the handsome young tenor and the guards. “M’sieu Janvier was injured, too, but not badly. Coffee for everyone?”

  He rattled down the steps to fetch the water, coat-skirts billowing around him, like an underfed and slightly pixilated grasshopper. January carefully kept himself from smiling at the expression of alarm that flashed across Marsan’s face at the prospect of sharing refreshment with one who was—by his slouched hat and straggling hair, his drawling river-rat English and the tobacco he spit casually on the floor—the brother-in-arms of every Kaintuck, keelboatman, filibuster, and Yahoo that had drifted downriver to invade what had been for so many years the haven of French civilization in the New World.

  If there were a form of address less respectful than tu, January reflected, leaning back in the deceptive gold-crusted cushions of the throne and closing his eyes, Marsan would use it to Shaw. He wondered how soon it would occur to the French Creoles to write to the Académie Française and ask that one be invented.

  Closing his eyes was like letting go of a rope and dropping into warm water fathoms deep. Full fathom five thy father lies . . .

  His arm throbbed, and reaction to the fray tugged him down.

  Co fee, he thought. There was an urn and spirit-kettle in the green room. Probably Italian-style, strong and bitter, but still nothing to the Algerian black mire Ayasha had made.

  His beautiful Ayasha. His wicked-eyed desert afreet whose death in the cholera had sent him, in grief too great to bear alone, from Paris back to New Orleans. Back to the only home he knew.

  Two years and six months. The fifteenth of August 1832. He recalled it to the day, and each day without her since, not yet quite a thousand of them. Beads of bloodstained jet on a string that might extend another thirty years before he reached his allotted threescore and ten.

  There had been a time when he’d wondered how to endure a single one of them.

  He had endured, of course. One did. He had learned to breathe again, and learned to laugh. Even to love— though the love he bore for the dear friend of his heart now was as different from Ayasha’s as a poppy in sunlight differs from the heavy beat of the summer ocean. But it was like learning to walk on wooden legs after a crippling injury. He couldn’t imagine ever not knowing
exactly how many days had passed.

  “Let’s get you home.” He smelled coffee, and Hannibal’s voice broke into the stillness of his thought. The fiddler set the cup on the floor beside the throne. “You look all in.”

  “I’ll stay.”

  “Shaw knows where to find you.”

  Behind them in the office Marsan was saying, “. . . some business with Monsieur Belaggio. I remained for a time after rehearsal. . . .”

  For three and a half hours? What business couldn’t wait for day?

  “I think I need to speak with him tonight.”

  “. . . shall manage somehow to be here in the morning. Never would I oblige Signor Caldwell to one day of worry, one hour, over the obligations which we have to his opera season here in New Orleans. È vero, I can conduct rehearsal from a chair, if I can but be borne in from my carriage. . . .” Belaggio’s voice faltered artfully, like a tenor dying at the end of Act Three.

  “They’re going to try again, you know.”

  “What?” Hannibal paused in the act of collecting his long hair back into its straying pigtail.

  “To kill him.” January opened his eyes. “Have you read the libretto of the opera we rehearsed tonight?”

  “Othello?” He thought about it, and something changed in the coffee-dark eyes. “Ah.” He coughed. “Yes.”

  “It’s probably the most beautiful setting I’ve ever encountered for that play,” said January quietly. “The version Belaggio has written makes Rossini’s look like a second-rate commèdia at a fair. Everything Shakespeare said, or implied, about jealousy, about passion, about the meanness of heart that cannot abide the sight of good . . .”

  “And all the audience will see,” finished Hannibal, “is a black man kissing a white woman.” He coughed again, and dragged up a gilt-tasseled footstool with a kind of swift, unobtrusive urgency.